Wednesday, April 12, 2017

New History of DARPA Reveals Wacky, Terrifying Schemes

The story of science in the service of war could start just about
anywhere in human history, from Persia with Alexander the Great to Egypt
with Napoleon. In her book about the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency (DARPA), the U.S. government’s defense science agency, Sharon
Weinberger selects as her starting point Nagasaki and the point of view
of a 6-year-old boy waking up in a city of rubble and seared flesh after
the second, and (so far) last, atomic bomb ever used on Earth.

In Vietnam in 1950, the U.S. Embassy in Saigon didn’t have a single
officer who spoke Vietnamese. What they lacked in cultural
understanding, though, the Americans made up for with science. By 1961,
the U.S. was moving closer to war, as the scientists’ psy-ops schemes
weren’t working to deter the Viet Cong. One plan was to play on local
superstitions. (In the Philippines, an American adman-turned-CIA-officer
had persuaded the anti-communist government to capture a rebel, drain
his blood and leave two puncture holes in his neck, to play on
villagers’ fear of vampires.) DARPA men also proposed herding pro-U.S.
peasants into “strategic hamlets.”

Social engineering took second place to designing new hardware and
weapons. For Vietnam, DARPA men dreamed up a fuel-efficient “airborne
Volkswagen,” land mines disguised as rocks, thermobaric weapons and
hormone-based plant killers to defoliate communist hideouts. The
chemical defoliant Agent Orange was one of the agency’s Vietnam
legacies.